How do you plot bar charts in gnuplot?

Question

How do you plot bar charts in gnuplot with text labels?

Answer 1

Simple bar graph:

set boxwidth 0.5 set style fill solid plot "data.dat" using 1:3:xtic(2) with boxes 

data.dat:

0 label       100 1 label2      450 2 "bar label" 75 

If you want to style your bars differently, you can do something like:

set style line 1 lc rgb "red" set style line 2 lc rgb "blue"  set style fill solid set boxwidth 0.5  plot "data.dat" every ::0::0 using 1:3:xtic(2) with boxes ls 1, \      "data.dat" every ::1::2 using 1:3:xtic(2) with boxes ls 2 

If you want to do multiple bars for each entry:

data.dat:

0     5 0.5   6   1.5   3 2     7   3     8 3.5   1 

gnuplot:

set xtics ("label" 0.25, "label2" 1.75, "bar label" 3.25,)  set boxwidth 0.5 set style fill solid  plot 'data.dat' every 2    using 1:2 with boxes ls 1,\      'data.dat' every 2::1 using 1:2 with boxes ls 2 

If you want to be tricky and use some neat gnuplot tricks:

Gnuplot has psuedo-columns that can be used as the index to color:

plot 'data.dat' using 1:2:0 with boxes lc variable 

Further you can use a function to pick the colors you want:

mycolor(x) = ((x*11244898) + 2851770) plot 'data.dat' using 1:2:(mycolor($0)) with boxes lc rgb variable 

Note: you will have to add a couple other basic commands to get the same effect as the sample images.